eye socket. The teeth were torn out.
Then Ben felt something give way with a wet, brittle crunch under his boot. He stumbled. Another skull floated up, crushed and black and burnt. Then a section of rib cage, like the remains of an old boat. He kicked them away in disgust.
It was what he’d feared from studying the plans of the facility, and now he saw that his suspicions had been right. The chamber was the crematorium for the slave workers who had perished building Kammler’s secret domain. The undiscovered mass grave of tens of thousands of nameless victims of the SS general’s brutality. They were standing on human remains. Stacks of charred bone. The piled ash of burnt flesh and clothing, mixed with rainwater seepage over the years to create a sickening mulch.
They splashed through the horror. Ben’s fingers closed on the bottom rung of the ladder and he hauled himself up the wall, closely followed by Jeff. There were gagging sounds in his earpiece as he reached the hatch, and he didn’t know how much longer he could keep from vomiting himself. He muttered a prayer, pushed his fingers through the iron grating and gave it a hard shove.
It didn’t move. It was either rusted shut, or it was locked from the inside. They were shut in here with the dead.
Far away from where Ben and Jeff were trapped inside the crematorium chamber, separated by millions of tons of solid rock and a maze of tunnels and corridors, Adam O’Connor was on his hands and knees on the concrete floor of the vault, surrounded by dismantled electronic components, mechanical linkages, magnetic coils, bits of wire. A chaotic mess of spanners and screwdrivers and soldering irons and voltmeters lay scattered around him.
He hated the machine almost as much as he hated the woman who’d tortured his son. All his rage, all his frustration at the situation he’d been plunged into against his will, were obsessively focused on it. His shirt stuck to him with sweat. Days of beard growth covered his jaw, and his eyes were stinging from lack of sleep. His trousers were worn through from kneeling on the rough concrete, his hands were lacerated from all the rusted bolts he’d had to slacken in the confined space of the machine, his fingers covered in burns from soldering the thousands of corroded connections he’d found. Any one of them could have accounted for the fact that, so far, he just simply could not get the fucking thing to work. Every time he found a new problem his heart would soar, thinking
Silent. Dead. Laughing at him. Just like it was now. Adam would have punched the loathsome thing, but his knuckles were too bruised and swollen from the hundreds of times he’d already done that.
He turned round and looked at Pelham. Every hour that Adam spent down here working on the Bell, Pelham was right there with him. Except that while Adam toiled and sweated and chewed his lip in terror of what was going to happen if he failed, Pelham had taken to lounging in a big armchair he’d had brought down for him, coolly reading newspapers and magazines while sipping on a long drink.
‘This is hopeless,’ Adam croaked. ‘It’ll never work.’
‘You’ll keep trying,’ Pelham said without looking up. He flipped a page of the magazine he was reading. Took another sip of his drink.
‘This thing is scrap metal. And even if it didn’t have mice living in it, and every linkage wasn’t seized solid, and every damn wire wasn’t crusted up with corrosion, and the valves weren’t rotted away to nothing, I still couldn’t make it work.’
Pelham put down the magazine. ‘We had an agreement, Adam. And frankly, your attitude is starting to wear out my patience.’
Adam dropped the spanner he was clutching and staggered to his feet, racked with cramp. He advanced on Pelham, enraged by the man’s obtuseness. ‘Listen to me. I’m not fixing a broken boiler here. This thing isn’t like some household appliance that you just plug in. It’s the most arcane piece of scientific hardware I’ve ever seen, and you’re asking me to fix it with bits of crap from the local toolshop. I can’t work in these conditions. I need a lab. I need more people. I need proper equipment. Maybe if we could just break the whole thing down and analyse every component, we could—’
‘This is it,’ Pelham said, motioning at the room. ‘This is as good as it gets. Live with it.’
‘You don’t understand how complex this thing is,’ Adam shouted.
‘You’re supposed to be the expert,’ Pelham said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’
Adam could feel his face turning crimson as his shouts reverberated around the inside of the vault. ‘And if I can’t get it to work, then you know what? You know whose fucking fault that’ll be? Not mine. Yours, asshole.
There was silence in the vault. Adam steadied himself against the machine, panting.
Pelham spoke softly. ‘You’re tired, aren’t you, Adam? Your nerves are ragged. You feel weak and confused and you don’t know how you can go on.’
Adam’s head sagged. He screwed his eyes shut and felt dizzy. He was one breath away from bursting into tears. ‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘If I could just sleep a while. Please. Then I’ll keep trying. I promise. Forget what I said. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.’
Pelham got up from his armchair, walked calmly over to Adam and put an arm benignly around his shoulders. ‘Can I tell you a story? I was a soldier once. Not your normal infantryman. We were something… special. Our selection training was very intense. You wouldn’t believe the things we had to do. Just when we thought we’d been tested to the absolute limit, they moved it to the next level.’ He smiled. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like to be hunted like an animal, can you? Alone in the dark, running scared, no food except what you can catch with your bare hands, no shelter, no sleep for days on end. But that’s what they did to us. They were teaching us to stretch the limits of what we thought possible, and those days taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I learned that those extremes of fear, pain, fatigue were my friends, because they concentrated my mind. Made me find reserves of strength within myself that I’d never dreamed of. That’s how I kept going. I made it through.’ Adam stared wordlessly at him.
‘But not every man passed the test,’ Pelham went on. ‘Some were broken. They gave in. And you know what they said, those losers, as they were being carried off, crying like babies? “I’m tired.”’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is, I could let you go back to your cell right now, so that you could spend the next ten hours sleeping. But the truth is, Adam, I don’t think it’s going to help you to give in like that. Deep down, I think you have the strength to keep going. You just need help to find it within yourself.’ He walked away from Adam and went over to the table beside his armchair. On it was a radio handset.
‘What are you doing?’ Adam said numbly.
Pelham picked up the radio. ‘Irina, this is Pelham. Respond, over.’
A pause, then a fizz of static. Reception was poor inside the mountain. But then Adam heard the woman’s voice reply and he felt his knees going weak.
‘Fetch the boy,’ Pelham told her. ‘Bring him down to the vault. You know what I’m saying. Over and out.’ He turned off the radio.
‘No,’ Adam said. ‘No, no. You don’t have to do this. I’ll—’ Pelham pointed at the machine. ‘You’ll make it work, believe me,’ he said. ‘When she’s cutting your son’s face off, five minutes from now right here in this room while you watch, I guarantee that’s going to concentrate the mind wonderfully. Let’s see how tired you are then.’
